8 Responses:

... the meters would be a financial hardship for churchgoers. Many of The City’s churches also act as social service sites and food pantries, meaning they’re catering to members who are low-income or strapped for money.

A) You live in San Francisco.
B) You are "low-income or strapped for money."
C) You own and drive a car around San Francisco instead of using public transit.
D) All of the above.

Really?

Or even worse:

E) You are "low-income or strapped for money" and don't actually live in San Francisco, but you drive in on Sundays just to go to church.

Shall I mention the number of cars allowed to double park and park in center left turn lanes without getting tickets all over the city so their owners can attend church services? And that this doesn't just happen on Sundays but on other days, as well? (See for example: Valencia Street between 22nd and 25th on Friday nights. And probably at other times, and other places.)

Hey, let's make a deal! Instead of expanding parking meter enforcement to Sundays, SF's DPT gets to issue parking tickets to all cars that are double parked or parked in left turn lanes around churches, on any day, at any time! Just a couple of those parking tickets would probably make up the revenue not gained from the parking meters around a church being non-operational during service hours on Sundays.

I never see a parking ticket on any of them around 7:00pm to 10:00pm when the church services end. If you're parked there after 10:00pm, though, you will get a parking ticket. City officials are just turning a blind eye.

I similarly see the double-parked cars of attendees of a church on Divisadero filling the street around here on Sundays:

"San Francisco's parking enforcement efforts are usually complaint driven on Sundays, so if there are no complaints, the City does not seek out double parking cases to issue citations. In cases where there are complaints, the City does issue citations and sometimes tow offending vehicles."

I suspect that one of the bigger fears of SF churches about parking meters being active on Sundays is actually that it would mean that instead of most parking control officers having Sunday off, they would instead be driving the carts around to enforce the meters. While they're doing that they would be obliged to put tickets on the hundreds and hundreds of cars they drive past that are illegally double parked on Sundays, as well.

So, right now the SFPD and the DPT are basically acting like Sgt. Schultz around churches on Sundays: "I see nothing... NOTHING!"

As I implied in my previous post, San Francisco is really leaving a lot more money on the table by not ticketing illegally parked cars on Sundays than they are by not making the meters active and collecting the quarters out of them.